Pebble Time 2 review: Brilliant battery life, e-paper display and plenty of personality

If you’ve been following smartwatch news in the last year and a bit, you might have heard that Pebble is back. If you don't know the story, here's a quick summary.

After becoming one of the defining smartwatch brands of the early 2010s, Pebble ran into financial trouble and shut down in 2016, with Fitbit acquiring its software, intellectual property and other assets. Fitbit kept Pebble's online services alive for a while, but they were eventually switched off in 2018.

Rebble emerged from the existing developer community almost immediately after the shutdown and effectively became the platform's unofficial custodian during the dormant years.

The group preserved a copy of the Pebble app store, including roughly 13,000 apps and watchfaces, created a new developer portal, and reverse-engineered services including weather, Timeline and voice transcription.

Then, years later – and miraculously, I might add – Google, which had acquired Fitbit in the meantime, decided to make PebbleOS open source, essentially giving the software back to the community.

Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky and several fellow ex-Pebblers jumped on the opportunity. Through his newly formed company, Core Devices, he set about reviving Pebble and picking up where the original company had left off nearly a decade earlier.

Pebble Time 2 was one of the first two watches Core Devices announced in March 2025 (alongside the simpler Pebble 2 Duo).

Now, almost a year and a half later, I managed to get my hands on one, which made me very excited. Not just because reissued watches – smart or otherwise – are in vogue, but also because I came to be very fond of Pebble as a company.

As such, I was looking forward to trying the wearable and seeing whether someone like me (i.e., a person with no interest in creating my own watch face or rewriting my smartwatch's code) could use and enjoy the Time 2.

And guess what? It’s a fun gadget that works as intended and looks the part, too.

Sure, it might not be as cheap as you’d imagine for something that’s not even remotely on par with modern smart wearables, but that’s not the point. The Time 2 gets you involved in a good initiative and lets you have a good time. And that's worth the money.

Pebble Time 2 review

Price and availability

Pebble announced the Time 2 in March 2025, and it's now available directly from Pebble for $225, which works out to roughly £166 / €194 / AU$312 at current exchange rates. There’s no official UK price, though, and British buyers will pay more once shipping and VAT are added.

Pebble ships international orders from its fulfilment centre in Asia using Delivered Duty Paid (DDP) shipping, meaning any taxes, duties and associated fees are collected before the watch is dispatched rather than appearing as an unexpected customs bill on delivery.

After spending much of its life as a pre-order, the Pebble Time 2 is finally in stock, with Pebble currently quoting dispatch within 48 hours. It comes in four colour combinations: Black/Grey, Black/Red, Silver/Grey and Silver/Blue. I used the Black/Red version for this review.

Design and build quality

The Pebble Time 2 looks exactly like you’d hope a modern Pebble would look. It’s square, slightly nerdy (and utilitarian), but there’s enough metal and detailing here to stop it feeling like a novelty throwback.

The case is CNC-milled from 316 stainless steel with a hardened PVD coating, while the front is covered by a flat Gorilla Glass lens, which I would say is solid specs for any watch in 2026.

It feels nice on the wrist, and considerably more premium than the plasticky smartwatches Pebble was best known for during its first life.

Four physical buttons surround the case, also made from CNC-milled stainless steel and given the same knurled finish Pebble used on the old Time Steel. They’re one of my favourite things about the watch.

After years of swiping around tiny touchscreens, there’s something wonderfully straightforward about being able to move through menus, dismiss notifications or control music without looking particularly closely at what you’re doing.

The Time 2 does have a touchscreen, but Pebble remains very much button-first, and almost everything can be accomplished without touching the display.

The other star of the show is the 1.5-inch, 64-colour e-paper screen. It has a modest 200 x 228 resolution, but judging it by pixel count rather misses the point. Unlike the OLED screens used on most modern smartwatches, it reflects ambient light rather than constantly blasting light towards your eyes.

As a result, it’s genuinely always on, but luminosity isn’t quite on par with modern AMOLED panels due to the softer contrast. The RGB backlight helps when things get darker or brighter, and you can activate it with a wrist flick, but still.

Colours are muted, and animations look distinctly retro compared with an Apple Watch or Pixel Watch, but that’s why it works. The transition animations, in particular, are fun to watch, with a mouse sneaking into your screen when you turn on the quiet mode.

Pebble includes a silicone strap in two lengths, covering wrists from 15 to 24cm, and thankfully hasn’t gone down the proprietary-band route. The watch uses standard 22mm quick-release straps, so swapping it for leather, fabric or pretty much anything else is straightforward.

Water resistance is rated at 3ATM, which Pebble says is suitable for casual swimming and showering, although the company explicitly warns against diving, hot water and high-pressure jets.

Features and PebbleOS

PebbleOS itself is wonderfully straightforward. Press the middle button on the right, and you’re presented with a simple vertical list containing things such as Music, Settings, Notifications, Alarms and weather. The buttons above and below scroll through the list, while the button on the left takes you back.

It took me very little time to get used to, and after a few days I found myself navigating the Time 2 without really looking at what my fingers were doing. There is a touchscreen, but I rarely felt the need to use it. The companion Pebble app is almost the opposite – once you dig into it, there are options everywhere!

You can alter the behaviour and intensity of the backlight, decide whether a wrist flick activates it, change vibration strength, adjust notification behaviour, configure Quiet Time, assign Quick Launch shortcuts and even reverse the controls for left-handed use.

There are thousands of watch faces to choose from (remember when I talked about 13,000 watch faces saved from the original app store above?), ranging from extremely simple digital faces to colourful retro designs, weather displays and wonderfully silly creations. Installing them from the Pebble app takes seconds, and many have their own settings.

I spent quite a lot of time swapping between them, partly because that's a major part of the fun of owning a Pebble. It’s nice that you don't have to write code or design your own watchface to appreciate the community behind the platform.

There is a downside, though. Watchfaces can have a surprisingly large impact on battery life. I tried one called Cat by Dalpek, featuring a 60s-inspired cat with animated eyes, and watched the battery drain much faster than it did with a simpler face.

Thankfully, Pebble gives you a detailed explanation of where the battery is going. The app breaks consumption down between the system, backlight, heart-rate monitor, Bluetooth, touch input, health tracking and applications/watchfaces, and even highlights periods of heavy usage.

Timeline

Timeline is another headline feature on the Pebble Time 2, which you can conjure by pressing down from the watch face. This lets you scroll chronologically through upcoming information.

In theory, that can include calendar appointments, weather, reminders and information added by third-party apps. In practice, I found mine rather sparse: most of what I saw consisted of upcoming meetings and sunset information.

That's useful, but I wouldn't describe Timeline as some forgotten smartwatch superpower that Apple and Google have somehow failed to replicate, and its usefulness certainly depends heavily on which apps and services you're using.

Health tracking

Pebble has also added some fitness and health functionality, although the company itself stresses that the Time 2 isn't a fitness watch.

The optical heart-rate sensor enables continuous heart-rate monitoring, while the watch records steps, distance, calories and sleep. The Pebble app offers far more health information than I expected, with day, week, and month views covering steps, heart rate, and sleep.

You won’t find any gamification in the app or on the watch (e.g. sleep score), and exercise tracking is also limited. There are essentially three choices – Run, Walk and Workout – and there's no onboard GPS or elaborate training ecosystem hiding underneath them. Nobody should be buying a Pebble Time 2 instead of a Garmin watch because they want to train for a marathon.

Sleep tracking is harder to excuse. I found it pretty inaccurate, to the point where I'd question whether it's currently worth having at all. Pebble could potentially improve it through software, and the company is continually updating PebbleOS, but right now it feels strangely at odds with the otherwise disciplined approach to features.

If you're going to make a virtue out of not cramming every conceivable smartwatch function onto your wrist, the few extras you do include should ideally work well.

Battery life and charging

Battery life is one of the Pebble Time 2’s biggest selling points, although there’s a sizeable asterisk attached to the headline figures.

Pebble says the current median is around 21 days between charges, with the hardware ultimately designed around a 30-day target. The company is still optimising PebbleOS, and points to the Pebble 2 Duo as evidence that there’s room for improvement; software updates apparently increased that watch from around 17 days to more than 30 days.

My experience with the Time 2 shows just how dramatically your setup can affect those numbers.

At one point, with 59% battery remaining, the Pebble app estimated that my particular configuration would manage only 11.4 days from a full charge. That’s nowhere near Pebble’s median figure, but the app also did a good job of explaining why.

It breaks battery consumption down by component and, during that period, the backlight accounted for a whopping 54.6% of my usage. The system itself accounted for 20.4%, while the heart-rate monitor used 10%, health tracking 7.6%, Bluetooth 3.8% and touch input 2.1%.

More importantly, the app doesn’t just dump those numbers on you. It identifies things that are hurting battery life and tells you what you can change. Mine pointed out that I had the backlight set above Medium, for example, and that my backlight timeout was longer than the default three seconds.

The small supplied dongle handles charging, which Pebble says was designed with help from Nomad Goods. It reminded me of Coros’ approach, and even though I appreciate the minimalist approach, it wouldn’t be too hard to lose the dongle considering how small it is. It works, though, and charges the watch pretty fast.

Verdict

The Pebble Time 2 is more of an enthusiast gadget than a mainstream smartwatch, and that’s exactly why it works for me. It deliberately gives up advanced fitness, payments and other modern conveniences in favour of great battery life, physical controls and endless customisation. Not essential, perhaps, but undeniably fun.